Monday, September 30, 2013

He was scorned by the art world, particularly
critics, but praised by William de Kooning and collected by Andy Warhol. He
studied at the Art Students League in New York City. For years he was a patient
and close friend of the psychoanalyst, Erik Erikson. He joined the cause for
nuclear disarmament and civil rights movement. His painting of a 6-year-old Black
girl breaking the color line accompanied by U.S. Marshalls against a wall of
KKK epithets became an iconic image of the school integration struggle. We
share a first name and one other curious event.

In 1957 both Norman Rockwell and I attended a
college extension course, albeit in far different parts of the country, called Discovering Modern Poetry. He married
his teacher. My class was under the auspices of UCLA and held at Peggy’s house.
I remembered her when we reconnected 23 years later and began my life part II. But
I digress.

He was a frail man raised at a time when Teddy
Roosevelt promoted the robust, athletic type as a male ideal. His work often showed
older men and boys caught in embarrassing moments, projections of how he saw
himself. He had three wives but was probably a closeted gay man. Few of his paintings
depicted women at all.

At age 22, in 1916, Rockwell’s illustration
made the cover of America’s most popular magazine. There were two weeklies with
the word Saturday in their title. One was the Saturday Review of Literature.
Readers of that literary magazine most probably looked down on the Saturday
Evening Post which employed Rockwell until 1963. The Post was vigorously
anti-New Deal and isolationist until it wasn’t supportable.

During the war
Norman Rockwell offered his Four Freedoms posters to the War Department and was
turned down. After they appeared on the cover of the Post the government
swallowed its pride and embraced the work reprinting them by the hundreds of thousands.
Rockwell also created Rosie the Riveter in 1943, the iconography of the time.

Along with Edward Hopper, who captured urban
desolation, and Grant Wood whose, American
Gothic, spoke of rural life in facetious tones, Rockwell’s work largely depicts
a vanishing Americana of small-town New England. He ranks as a first-class
draftsman but was he an illustrator or an artist? Now that I’ve posed the
question I want to discredit it.

Is it art, might also be asked about
work hanging in many contemporary galleries. If art is defined as that which confounds,
agitates and shifts perception then Rockwell could be consigned to the category
of illustrator. He was not only dismissed by the Modernists but regarded as the
bourgeois antithesis of what they were all about. While the New York School
veered toward reduction and negative space Rockwell’s canvases were almost
cluttered.

But I abhor categories. Blurring the lines
between is more fun. I’m all for inclusion. It can be argued that much of
minimalist art is elitist, soulless and opaque. At least Norman Rockwell knew
how to connect. His genre work offered immediate recognition. The first half of
the 20th century was a time when immigrant America had to invent
itself and he found the populist links and rituals. His genius was to create a
human drama in the moment. Even if we never found our real selves in the scene,
our idealized self would know the way around. And perhaps his homey
representations were not as benign as at first glance.

One of his most famous pictures is Thanksgiving
dinner as the representation of Freedom
from Want. Those gathered around the table are not looking at either
Grandma or the turkey. None are bowed in prayer giving thanks and one central figure
has a look on his face as if he is only begrudgingly present. This could have
been Rockwell himself. He was estranged from his own nuclear family as he took
vacations with his male model and friends. Rockwell is less a realist than a
fabulist.

Perhaps Rockwell can be compared to Robert
Frost. In their separate art forms each took a path less traveled by avant-guarde
movements. Their words and images will endure as Yankee-bred artists whose
narratives welcome the reader and viewer and are deceptively familiar but
demand repeated visits. Is it Art? I say, Yes, make room for him.

Wednesday, September 25, 2013

The calendar says we turned a corner last week into
autumn but you’d never know it here where we live without seasons. Seventy-two
and sunny with no relief in sight. Another day without weather to speak of.

Each of the four seasons carries remnants of
the previous and portends of the next. In his poem, Autumn, Keats likened the
early days to Dionysus or Bacchus swollen still with summer and the juice of
the vine only to yield to Apollo preparing cerebrally for the chill of winter.

Here in Southern California September can be
our hottest month, bee-loud glens (Yeats, not Keats) and increments of green
outside our window. In a few weeks I’ll know the turning only when pumpkin ice
cream shows up along with Halloween costumes and all things man-made orange.

What have we lost contravening Nature’s
rhythms? Is it enough just to listen to
Vivaldi’s Four Seasons? The barren landscape of a North American winter
corresponds to our need for introversion; to be driven from external revelry
and ripeness to experience the sting of deprivation and darkness. We can compensate as we do with Christmas
lights and giftwrap or just stay quiet exploring our inscape. Napoleon would
have been better advised to stay home with a good book instead of trudging
across Russian steppes in the dead of winter. Had he read Shakespeare he would have recognized winter’s discontent.

Father, father…do we live in Poland or Russia?
Now, my son, this land is Poland. Thank God, father, I couldn’t take another
Russian winter.

In my New York years summer’s lease ended
abruptly on Labor Day followed by no-nonsense school days, rules, theorems,
axioms and all attention to be paid. I don’t suppose I’ll ever know whether to
attribute this swerve of seasons to my youth or Eastern weather. I haven’t
experienced it since.

The scene-shifts are more subtle in the
Southland where we have to find resonance with whale-watching, budding camellia
or jacaranda trees unleafing. The languor and excess of July can extend far
into November. It’s an adjustment I’m happy to make. The image of a goddess
sleeping in the fields watching a cider-press (Keats, not Yeats) is quite
compelling.

There is a weather we carry within. Let it shine
and let it cloud. We have our own equinox and solstice and everything in
between. The calendar is only a prompt to remind us.

I wish Keats' and Yeats' names rhymed, being poets, but
they don’t, just as life doesn’t rhyme even on the equinox, being equal parts
darkness and light. I was born on that other equinox. I’m told that puts me on
the cusp between Aries the Ram and Pisces the fish. Maybe I’m the amphibian who
left water to grow four feet and say Bah. Or maybe all words rhyme compared to
silence.

Sunday, September 22, 2013

Maps have always held a fascination for me. Even spelled
backwards they are fun. SPAM became one of Monty Python’s greatest routines, Hush, dear, don’t make a fuss. I’ll have
your Spam; I luv it.

Early maps tell us much why the Dark Ages were well-named.
Cartographers depicted dragons in oceans and distorted certain land-mass to
comply with Biblical interpretations. As late as the 13th century a
famous map represented Rome as the shape of a lion with Christ on top of the
world and his hands spread out in the shape of Eurasia.

In 1492 Columbus was famously sent out by Ferd and Izzy to
pick up some Chinese food and came back with a new continent on his plate. His
discovery sent map-makers working through the night redrawing new squiggles.
Some depicted Brazil as an island others thought it a hunk of Asia but all indigenous
people were deemed worthy of having their souls saved….whether they wanted to
or not. That was the least Europeans could do for those ungrateful heathens.
And besides, the Spanish and Portuguese thought they smelled gold just around
the next bush.

At least they knew which way to turn their sails. Fast
forward six centuries and George Dubya wasn’t sure where Europe was on the map
but with some help from his friends, unfortunately, he found Iraq. Recent polls
now indicate that 85% of Americans can’t find Syria on the map and, even more
scary, 56% of those working in the Pentagon couldn’t find it either. One hopes
they get their bearings before sending any drones.

300 million years ago, give or take a week, the entire land
mass of Earth was bunched together. Geographers call it Pangea. The Americas
fit into Africa which was knit into Eurasia just as Australia was linked with
India. It was a golden age for fish unless they were swallowed by bigger fish. At least they were not menaced by fishing nets. But maps are organic; they are in flux and
perhaps never more so than in this century with coastlines under assault and
deserts inching into adjacent territory.

After WWI France and England carved up the Ottoman Empire
the way one would carve that other turkey on Thanksgiving. They created new
countries heedless of white meat and dark meat, today’s tribal allegiances.
They may have been distracted, salivating over that black gravy under the sand.

Britannia ruled the waves for several centuries. All but 22 countries
were invaded by the Brits. Except for our current misadventures countries don’t
much bother invading anymore. They just let their corporations do the deed. The busiest
McDonalds in the world is in Pushkin Square, Moscow, with 27 cash registers. Japan
sells Big Macs in over 3,600 outlets. Americans can travel thousands of miles
and feel like they’ve never left home particularly if they stay close to their
hotel lobby.

There seem to be two opposing forces at work which describe
our times. Science and Western-style Enlightenment threaten religious
fundamentalism, male chauvinism and tribalism. As multinational brands and global
technology are making us less differentiated, radical forces resist commodification
and assert their traditions however self-serving they may be. It also diverts
attention from the plight of those suffering from the accident of geography. At
the same time there is much about our social mores worth resisting.

Can universality respect the Self? Will future maps look like China, all in one
color or more like Africa partitioned into 43 paint chips? Maps register
partitions, some topographical, others artificial. Count me as one who doesn’t
love a wall.

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

I never expected to live this long but thanks to a diet of
banana peels and genetically engineered ostrich burgers here I am an over-ripe
166 years old. I should also give credit to my daily dish of aphids and silver
fish washed down with Schultz’s plant food. Just last week I picked up a new
bionic liver and esophagus at Costco. Of course I had to buy two of each and fortunately
sold the extra ones on Irving’s List which bought out Craig back in 2037.

As I look back on the century changes in the world order
seem both unexpected and yet inevitable. Remember all that fuss over
Guantanamo? avana Havana Cuba
disappeared in the rising Atlantic along with other Caribbean islands. Major
league baseball was devastated but Dominicans managed to resettle in what used
to be Miami and the Bronx. Canada has flowered from global warming moving it to
number one position in spite of having nearly fracked itself to death. The
arctic passage has long since made the Panama Canal a favorite only of cruise
ships. The Chinese-built Nicaragua Canal is now the waterway for the Southern
Hemisphere. Malibu, the sunken city, became a tourist destination for scuba
divers looking for underwater movie star loot.

Circa 2020 Red States seceded from the Union much to the
jubilation of Blue States. They soon became the dumbest country in the world
with the highest rate of infant mortality, illiteracy, shootings, revisionist
history books and drum majorettes. A move to relocate them to Mars where there
is no science, no healthcare and no government never got off the ground. Occasionally
Red Staters slip up across the Mason-Dixon Line longing for Yankee pot roast and
Maine lobster while others head south to Mexico as illegals for jobs as
stoop-laborers picking the avocado crop.

Ever since bullets and guns were declared weapons of mass
destruction and the NRA designated as a subversive organization prisons have been
converted to monastic cells where female and male priests raise hell and their
wee ones. Since the Ottoman Empire was restored relative peace has prevailed in
the Middle East. Sunnis and Shiites rediscovered their common denominator and
even extended their kinship to Israel as fellow Semites.

As for technology I’ve managed to preserve my ignorance of
all things wireless, digital or algorithmic. The only advance which has caught
my attention is the communication device implanted at birth in the fingers of
newborns. What we used to call a telephone is now embedded in pinkie and thumb
to record every gurgle and whimper, gasp of amazement, proclamation of love,
bewilderment, gurgle and whimper again and possibly a final koan as loud as one
hand clapping. I’m happy to report the eternal verities survived another
century though in nearly unrecognizable dress. Consciousness comes but hard earned.

Friday, September 13, 2013

And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Snowman by Wallace
Stevens

The athlete without
the menace of tattoos or grizzled sneer is pitching for the Dodgers. He is
notable for their absence, nothing but his bare arm does the talking. His
performance is enough without the compensation of signage. No snakes or
crossbones, no platitudes
passing for wisdom, no advertisements for himself.

Makes me long for
absences. The unadorned, bling and swagger gone. Hushed stadium filled
with expectation. The inner eye. Exhausted words piled in a corner decomposing.
Lost continent of mother's arms. Blank page surrounding a haiku. Rapid minimal strokes
of black ink in a Japanese brush painting urge the essence from fallen petals.
An unmet friend lo these many years and then words you cannot quite find.
October maple is a ruddy diva in her death bed scene singing beyond the genius of the leaves. Skeletal trees in the mind of
winter. The nothing that is there and the
nothing that isn’t. To see what is not there is to behold a reality without
all the connotations we have laid upon it. One has to see with the coal eyes of
the snowman to have the mind of winter.

The wall in the
Louvre was blank with only a nail where Mona Lisa hung a week after it was
stolen in 1911. That was when Kafka traveled to witness what wasn't there. He saw
the painting with his eye turned inward and he beheld its absence. The
Portuguese have a word, suade,
meaning combined joy and sadness for what is no longer there. Since Leonardo’s
painting was returned it has been defaced with acid and knives. It puts me in
the mind of tattoos.

On the other hand, eight years later, Marcel Duchamp painted
a moustache and beard on her face and turned the art world upside down by freeing
our mind of expectations. This is what we get for loving something to death. With
his slight alterations Duchamp redeemed the piece from the banality of postcard
reproductions back into an organic creative form. A Dadist act against high
culture decontextualized it and brought Mona Lisa back to life.

Maybe I’m wrong about tattoos. They are also a strike
against established ways, a crude statement about individuality, a shock to
convention. Some women find them sexy, so I’m told. They declare that one’s
body belongs to oneself to do with as one pleases. Whatever they are rattles my
sensibility. I can turn away if I like and I shall. I assert my right to bare
arms, my preference to see the nothing that is. At the center of the Mona Lisa
is an ambiguity of gender, enigmatic smile and space which allows us to enter.
We come closer to her mystery and our own.

Monday, September 9, 2013

I just got a call from Bashar al-Assad. He wants me to become a
double agent. I started to tell him he
had the wrong number but then I remembered I already was a double agent. I had
infiltrated Red States when I agreed with Rand Paul this past week and even considered going to a gun show nostalgic for my old water pistol. Assad repeated
his offer. I figured I could use the extra money to pay for my overdue library
books.

He said he needs me to listen to what Americans are saying
about Obama’s strike across his bow. I told him I don’t get out much anymore
except for crowded elevators in medical buildings and lunch with friends. He
suggested I might ride up and down for a few hours and also overhear what
average citizens are saying in the next booth in restaurants. I told him my
hearing wasn’t too good particularly with ambient noise from waiters
auditioning for parts in B movies.

He then asked me where his bow was. I told him it was just a
figure of speech; it could mean the end of a palace or two with collateral
damage that might destroy a few dry cleaner stores with some prayer rugs.

I took a chance and asked why he resorted to Sarin gas. He
said it was his crazy son-in-law who belongs in a temper-management program. I
knew what he was talking about remembering my crazy uncle who we let out of the
attic room once a year for Thanksgiving dinner.

I thanked him for breaking the Red and Blue divide in my
country. Everyone is making new friends or at least putting up with each other. Because of Assad anti-Viet Nam war activists like Kerry are now
rattling their drones and old Neo-Cons like Rumsfeld sound like conscientious
objectors…though some want to erase Syria from the map..... if they could only find it. Reds and Blues are
mingling their t-shirts in all-night laundromats. A truce has been called in
food-fights. Unitarians have been spotted in Southern Baptist churches and red
necks are taking English as a second language.

When I requested an advance on my commission the line went
dead. Hello, hello, I barked. I heard
a few clicks and beeps with a message that I had two calls waiting. One from Edward Snowden (who had nothing better to do) and the other from the
NSA.

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

In the mortal frame
made of a hundred bones….there is something which can be called a windswept
spirit. Basho

Sometimes a caged bird is not a metaphor and bird poop on
the window is not short-hand for impending doom. Berkley East Convalescent
Hospital has both and the news is all good.

Enough already! Peggy will have been eight weeks, five days
in rehab and they are finally showing her where the door is this Saturday. Not to be wheeled
but to walk out with her walker. In horizontal, out vertical. During her stay
it should surprise nobody that she got to know every caregiver, therapist and
many fellow patients by name and wrote poems for over a dozen of them. When you
learn each of their stories and get a hug from many as you are wheeled down the
hall it must be time to leave. Skilled
and gracious as the staff is, one wishes never to return.

Peggy’s femur fractured just below the hip socket in four
places but her spirit was never broken. If she could have been lifted in body
as in mind she would have been launched, wind-swept, into orbit two months ago. A friend of mine in New York calls every week
to cheer her up and told me he was the one who is cheered.

Time, reputed to
be the great healer turned out to be a double agent. The healing which happens
over time is in combat with passivity the consequence of which is atrophy. She
had to inch through the hurt in order to restore movement.

The eye is a camera panning our field of vision, both inner
and outer. It could choose the splattered excrement or it might fix on the blue
parakeets and love birds in the exercise room with plumage that stretches the
imagination. Then there is the purplish bromeliad by Peggy’s bedside with
ancestors from the Amazon. Or the patients brought to their knees by some terrible swift sword, down but not out,
their aged faces moving from faraway bewilderment to a kind of grace; a
recognition that there is still time allotted for them to move in new ways. I
have had conversations with several film directors who at one time had
positions of power and were now defenseless. As they came to terms with their
predicament their look seemed to take on a dimension never felt before. To
witness that transformation was an unexpected privilege as they tapped into a
resource within.

Home is everyone’s destination. Yet Peggy accommodated
herself so well at the convalescent facility that it became a kind of home. My
daughter likened it to a cruise ship on the way to nowhere. As a poet, she lives in another country, her imagination, which is portable.

As for the bird droppings they still remain. The window is
on the fourth floor and louvered. It would take Spider Man with a high-pressured hose to clean it up. It is
unsightly but a constant reminder that poop happens in life. How we deal with
it says it all and Peggy has transcended the poop.

Sunday, September 1, 2013

I’m not quite ready to throw out my Obama t-shirts and
campaign buttons but he’s got me squirming. Granted the so-called Arab Spring is a muddled picture which will only be sorted out
half a century hence but our administration has mishandled the Syrian conflict.
Red lines, ultimatums and missteps have discredited his presidency, split his
party and created repugnant bedfellows.

Did I miss the proclamation that conferred supreme authority
to the U.S. for policing the planet and dispensing punishment? Who are we to
claim the moral high ground after decimating Iraq? In the eyes of the
developing world it is the United States alone that dropped two nuclear bombs,
blundered into Southeast Asia and continues to have hundreds of thousands of
troops stationed abroad.

A surgical strike against Damascus is the fevered dream of a
punitive mind. It will change nothing except to possibly provoke a response
against Israel or ignite a conflict even beyond that region. What we call
limited may not be so contained as we may think. Scold and slap could easily lead to shock and awe.

Obama had been proceeding along a calculated line of measured constraint relative to Egypt and even Libya. He seemed to be threading
the needle and successfully ignoring the clamor from McCain and the Neo-Cons
who never met a war they didn’t love. It has been his own reckless rhetoric
that has gotten Obama into this no-win crisis. Whether he was goaded into
verbal outrage or he has bought into it is a matter of conjecture but it issues
from an assumption of American hegemony as if our arsenal grants us the
privilege to intercede anywhere and call it a matter of national security. It
reeks of the missionary mind set.

Indeed the use of Sarin gas is reprehensible but a
retaliatory measure would undoubtedly add to the loss of life. One violation of
International Law is not remedied by another. War crimes are a matter for the
World Court. It is enough for now that we denounce the act, bring our evidence
to the General Assembly of the United Nations and urge some sort of universal condemnation. A military
response is irresponsible, illegal, counterproductive and undermines the U.N.

Obama is, of course, also the
Commander-In-Chief presiding over the mightiest military in human history but
it comes at the moment that tribal societies long under the press of Western
powers are convulsing with forces in several directions. Our role has yet to be
articulated or even formulated. I should have known better than expect my
president to rise above the fray. There is little reason to suppose he has the political
muscle or the will to bring our legions home and divert our enormous resources
away from weaponry toward domestic imperatives.